


Not Management Material

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Exhibitionism, Ghosts, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Racist Language, Snowed In, The Shining AU, Time Travel, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 06:38:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15943817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: While trying to outrun the blizzard, they don't quite make it to Minnie's.





	Not Management Material

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Your prompt for Warren and Mannix wandering into a seventies Overlook Hotel kind of ate my brain. This fic was the result, and I hope it satisfies. Have a great exchange!

  
Warren was not in the habit of imbuing places with meaning or personality. He sure as shit didn't believe in hauntings, and he should know, having spent more nights in the company of dead bodies than warm ones, at least lately. He'd blazed through too many blood-soaked places in his life to name, plantations and battlefields and massacre sites, and he'd hated some of them, but he'd never felt any of them hate back. Strip away the people, and they were just a place like any other. Dead ground was a lot like dead bodies, and in his considerable experience, no great mystery lurked in either.

That was before he stepped foot in the Overlook Hotel.

\---

The blizzard had caught up with them when the stagecoach was less than a mile from Minnie’s. So he hadn’t been surprised when they jerked to a dead stop, visibility being as bad as it was.

“What?” Mannix jerked up out of a deep sleep. “We there already?”

“Not hardly,” said John Ruth grimly. “That’s a stuck wheel if I’ve ever felt it. You freeloaders go out and lend a hand.”

Wind whipped snow in their faces so hard they were practically blind outside. They fucked around with the wheel while O.B. tried to get the horses to pull them out. Mostly the two of them just knelt there like assholes, trying to get the wheel loose when it seemed stuck fast.

His vision flickered for a minute. It was a funny sensation, like the world itself was shuddering in and out of view. He became slowly aware of a strange humming, like the sound of wasps, which grew in volume as he worked. Wasps in a blizzard were an impossibility, and wouldn’t have risen over the sound of the wind in any case. But still the sound grew, until it was deafening, and the flickering just about blinded him.

He came to lying flat on his back in the snow. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but a thin coating of snow lay on him, and the stagecoach was gone. He sat up fast. For a minute he wondered if John Ruth was bastard enough to have taken off and left him there. He hadn’t thought it, but then, he hadn’t thought he was bastard enough to put him in handcuffs either.

He looked down. There weren’t any tracks in the snow, and that was funny.

It was snowing hard, too damn hard to see far, but he fixed his eyes in the direction of Minnie's, and he was rewarded. There was a dark mass recognizable as a building. Lights burning in the windows. He made toward it instinctively, but he saw at once that something about it was wrong. It was too big. Way too damn big, and way too many windows. For a desperate moment he wondered if he’d been mistaken, if they'd somehow stumbled into Red Rock, but there was nothing like this in Red Rock either. Four stories and too many windows to count, all lit up like a Christmas tree.

He stood shivering, and felt a powerful urge to turn around and walk away from it, it was that damn disconcerting, but the wind picked up and settled him on that score. He had no desire to die in the snow, after the day he'd had. That was when he heard a voice beside him.

He had thought he would have given just about anything to see a familiar sight just then, but Chris Mannix’s face wasn’t it.

“Major!” he sat up, having been lying in the snow himself. “Where is everyone? They go on ahead without us?” Then he saw the hotel and stared up at it, looking so dumbfounded Warren almost found it funny. “Well now, that shouldn’t be there.”

“But it sure does seem to be,” said Warren.

“What happened here?” Mannix asked.

He thought of the flickering, the humming like wasps.

“Some nigh inexplicable shit,” he said. He wasn’t going to stand outside, shouting over a blizzard at Chris Mannix. So he stopped talking, and focused on walking. When he got to the front door, he knocked, then figured, hell, if this was a hotel, they could just let themselves in. They were guests, after all. Stepping inside, Warren’s first impression was that the place was lit up bright. It should have been a comforting thing, but it wasn’t.

“Hello, friends? Anyone here?” Mannix called.

His voice echoed all up and down the lobby, off Indian red columns and shiny mosaic tiled floors. A hollow sort of echo. While Mannix waited for an answer that didn’t come, Warren took off his hat and wiped the snow off it. It was a hotel, sure enough. There was a front desk off to the right, stately dark wood counter wrapping around a dark wood office. Everything was closed up neat and tight. The place was deathly still. It shouldn’t have existed, not on Minnie’s mountain, not anywhere in Wyoming, at a size like this, yet here it was. A mirage you could walk right into. He wondered if this was the dying fantasy of a brain freezing to death out in the snow, but, shit, he felt the rough fabric of the chair nearest him under his fingers with the kind of clarity that doesn’t come in dreams, and then he thought— _there’s no way I would have dreamed up this decor._

The lights kept unsettling him. They glowed from a dozen chandeliers, too bright, too steady, too perfect to be any kind of normal light. There was a brass light fixture on one of the walls in the lobby and Mannix swanned on up to it. He tapped the frosted glass and hissed. "Damn, whatever it is, it’s hot, but it ain’t any kind of flame. You ever heard of such a thing?”

He had, as a matter of fact. He’d once got stuck on a stagecoach to Denver with some asshole going on about the possibilities of electric lighting. It’d be coming within a decade or two, he swore. He knew a man who knew a man who’d filed a patent or some shit. “I have. But it was some pie-in-the-sky World’s Fair talk when I heard of it. I don’t know why it’s here.”

“Lights that shouldn’t exist for a building that shouldn't exist. Makes a kind of sense,” Mannix said, too damn cheerful about the whole thing.

Warren approached the dark varnished counter. There was a stack of embossed business cards sitting in a neat little cardholder at the front desk. He picked one up. It was white, printed with embossed gold. The Overlook Hotel, Wyoming. Founded 1907.

He read it three times, but it didn’t change. He passed the card wordlessly to Mannix. “It must be a mistake,” Mannix said at last.

Warren wasn't so sure. The unease he felt deepened, and he went around to the other side of the counter, found a calendar. 1975. His stomach twisted in a way he didn't rightly remember it ever twisting before. The two of them turned the office inside out, and if it was a mistake, it was a mistake that repeated everywhere. The current year, according to every slip of paper documenting the most recent season, was 1975.

“This explains some things,” Warren said.

“How _the fuck_ does it explain anything?” It seemed there was a limit to the amount of weird shit Mannix could take with good cheer.

“The lights, for one. Why this place is here, for another. It’s here because it belongs here. In 1975.”

“That ain’t an explanation. That’s just swapping out one mystery for a bigger one.”

He smirked a bit at Mannix. It wasn’t that he felt calm about it. If he thought too hard about it, he thought his skin might crawl right off him. A hundred fucking years. But losing your head never did help anything. And staying calm seemed to rile Mannix, which was its own reward.

“Guess we better get to work figuring shit out then. I’m searching this place.”

Mannix frowned, then trotted after him like a dog. “Well I ain’t just standing here twiddling my thumbs while you do something. I’m coming too.”

So Mannix tagged along at his heels, pale as a ghost, a bit more tolerable now that the asshole bluster had been stripped out of him. Once he caught Warren glancing back at him and straightened up, like it was his own daddy who’d caught him looking scared in the heat of battle. Like he cared what Warren thought.

As it turned out, searching the place didn’t get them any closer to telling them why they were there. But it was when they started to understand just how deep shit they were in ran.

They were in the west wing when they turned down one of the hallways. This hallways distinguished itself from all the other identical hallways with tight-closed doors by having the last door on the left wide open. Warm light poured out of the room, spilling across the carpet. They exchanged glances.

Mannix called down the hallway, “Anyone here?”

He got back nothing.

He shrugged a bit helplessly at Warren, then squared his shoulders and walked down the hall.

He watched Mannix go. Watched that asshole strut down the hallway and he suddenly wished he had managed to hang onto his gun. There was something about the way that asshole moved that summoned the desire to plant a bullet between his shoulder blades.

Mannix got to the door, then stepped back so violently he backed right into the wall.

“Goddamn fucking shit, major, come quick-” he said. “I found people.”

It was a family. A dead family. White, neatly dressed. They had died messy. In a chair in the corner a man slumped with his head blown back, shotgun fallen beside him on the floor. A lady and two girls lay on the floor. An axe, he’d guess. He felt a flicker of something that might almost have been sympathy, looking at the hapless sprawl of the bodies, though it passed soon enough. Death had a way of taking the dignity out of everyone, and this seemed an ugly way to die.

Mannix was breathing hard, looking like he hadn’t ever seen a murdered family before, leastwise not a white one. Maybe he really hadn’t. Warren turned to him, and snapped his fingers in his face.

“Get yourself together, white boy. It’s only murder.”

“Only murder,” said Mannix, offended, like his hands were fucking spotless. “I know four murders is a 'before breakfast' sort of thing for you-”

“Don’t act like you didn’t do your fair share. Or does it only count when they’re white?”

  
And that hate that had flared up when Mannix’s back was turned kicked up higher, now that he was looking in his ugly face. They turned away from the grisly tableau in the bedroom to stare down each other, like two unarmed gunslingers.

He dimly understood what they were both doing, focusing on the one problem in this whole mess that still made any kind of sense, that they could still solve. Well, you do what you can, when you can. He stepped towards him, and was pleased to be reminded that if Chris Mannix was younger and sprier than he was, he still had a few inches on him and a hell of a lot more brains. And Mannix noticed it too, eyes widening as Warren backed him against the wall. He liked that look that skittered across Mannix’s face, fast as a hare running, saying he’d never once in his life faced down a black man in a fair fight, no white militia backing him up. It wasn’t pissing-himself fear, but real worry all the same, and Warren was gratified to hell and back by the sight of it. Worry, and maybe something else even more interesting.

He leaned forward, and for a moment there was real tension crackling between them. Then he reached out and put a hand on the wall beside Mannix’s head, meaning to pin him in further. He touched the wall—it was the first time he’d reached out and touched anything since he arrived in the hotel, and it looked like ordinary wallpaper, but it felt like the texture of old dead skin, of empty wasps nests. And when he touched it he felt it stir, tremble. He felt it touch back. Had the sudden, inexplicable sensation of something abuzz with excitement, bloodthirst, and anticipation.

He jerked his hand away, and the sensation broke off abruptly, like a telegraph line that had been cut. He looked at Mannix, who was holding real still, close enough to dance as they were. He seemed not to like the look of whatever was in Warren’s eyes too well, because he forced his eyes away, and looked towards the open bedroom with the dead body.

“Jesus, look,” Mannix said, and his voice was so strangled Warren really did look.

The bodies were gone. The blood was gone from the floor. The bedspread, the walls were all neat and clean, like they’d been freshly scrubbed. It was a banal neatly made hotel room again.

Where murder hadn’t chilled him, this did. He felt the sick feeling he’d got in his stomach, seeing _1975_ on those papers, all over again. Mannix stepped inside, looking around with wide eyes.

“Well, I don’t know about you, major, but I’m having a really fucking bad day, and it’d be nice if things just started making _fucking sense_ for a while.” And he went over to the chair and started kicking the shit out of it in frustration.

Warren ignored him, focusing on the handgun that was sitting neatly on the bedside table. He couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been there with the bodies, but he was thinking it had just appeared there, just now. He was thinking it was laid there like an offering, or a gift. _You wanted a gun? Here. Don’t say I never gave you anything._

Mannix turned around then, and he saw it sitting there.

But Warren was closer. He picked it up, and felt the comforting weight of it in his hand. He raised it, and thought for a moment about the satisfaction of killing Chris Mannix. One problem that could still be solved in this nightmare.

Then he thought again of that trembling excitement he’d felt coming off the wallpaper. Which was some crazy bullshit to even think, but he had felt it. He thought about killing Chris Mannix because some fucking hotel that manifested visions of dead families and magic weapons seemed to want him too. That made him lower the gun. “Kind of convenient, this turning up here. Little too convenient. Almost like we’re being set at each other’s throats.”

It didn’t make any sense, but saying it aloud made it seem like it did. It occurred to him that if something did want them fighting, it would see them as easy marks, maybe comically so. The black Union man and the Confederate shitkicker walk into a hotel….

“But I don’t kill on anyone’s say-so but my own.”

Mannix swallowed, looking around the room, seeming to know whatever had just happened hadn’t exactly been between just the two of them. “You think there’s something else in here? Something… alive?”

He holstered the gun, and they kept moving.

“Alive might be pushing it. But there’s something here, all right.”

  
\---

They kept going. On the second floor, they found a bedroom with the passkey sticking out of the door. They looked at each other, and Warren could see that in this, at least, they were in agreement. If this place had something for them, he was going to see what it was.

They looked through the whole room. But it was Mannix that found it. It was in the bath. Just a rotting corpse. But unlike the dead family, it wasn’t a mere vision. It started to stand.

The thing in the bath wasn't alive, but it wasn't dead either. About all you could say for the thing in the bath is you knew it wasn't gone. And you knew it hated you.

He took out the gun and shot it as it walked towards them, but he wasn’t surprised when that did nothing. It being dead, it wasn't a thing you could kill. Something protested in his mind at that. Everything could be killed. Anything otherwise defied the whole rational calculus by which he'd lived his life. For a moment, he was stumped. And Marquis Warren wasn't ever stumped.

He felt a hand on his arm. Mannix had put his hand on his arm. Whether to pull him away from it or some kind of panicky white-boy plea for protection he didn’t know, and doubted Mannix knew himself. But just the thought brought him back to himself. Mannix being who he was reminded him of who he was.

“We get out of here,” he said, like he was responding to a question Mannix had asked. Maybe he had. He had not been entirely sure of himself for a minute there. “Think you can do that, white boy?”

“I sure as hell can,” Mannix said, and there was some grit in that voice after all. Stripped down, but smooth and cool, like the surface of a stone.

They did walk out then. He had, he realized, no idea if the thing would follow them. But he could see that the thing had once been alive, and it had died there, and so it seemed to stand to reason that it might stay there. They didn’t have any other hope. They were operating according to older rules now.

Every moment he got ready to feel its hand on his back, but it didn’t come. When they reach the suite’s living room, they ran for the door, got out into the hallway, and closed the door. A few moments later, the knob began to turn, slowly. It jostled back and forth for a few long moments, and then it began to laugh.

They hightailed it out of that wing, and they didn’t go back.

  
\---

  
“Fuck this,” Mannix said. “We need to get out of here. Out of this goddamned hotel.”

“I’m all for that, but use your head. Where we going to go?”

“Out in the woods, living the cold life. Who cares? I spent last night in a fucking hollow, I can do it again.”

“Not out in a blizzard like that. You’ll freeze before morning. Our only chance of getting out of this alive is to stay put.”

“With that—” he stopped, looking like he was wrestling with himself about saying a word he was reluctant to use. “With the thing in the bath that wants to kill us? Or whatever it is who wants us to kill each other?”

“Shit, I’ve lived through worse.”

Mannix looked at his skeptically, like he really didn’t believe that was so.

Sure, it wasn’t exactly the same, but he had lived among plenty of people who hated him before. He knew how to make a home on top of a pile of hostility. He could survive a night in this place.

It seemed there was nothing to do after that, exhausted and bone-tired, but go to bed. They had reached the limit of weird shit a man could take in a single day. If there was one thing there was no shortage of in a hotel, it was bedrooms, but somehow neither of them suggested holing up in different sides of the hotel. He wasn’t quite sure why. No room was necessarily safe, but he hoped maybe some were safer than others. The one they settled on didn’t make the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, so he figured that was something.

There were two beds in the room, they’d made sure of that when they’d entered, but he felt no real surprise when Mannix slid into place in the bed beside him. He looked at him like he was just daring Warren to say something about it. Maybe he was hoping Warren would order him out, and he could spare himself the humiliation of actually wanting to share a bed. But Warren didn’t give him that out, just said, “You scared, Mannix?”

“Shut the fuck up. I just think it’s safer if we keep close.”

“You flop around when you sleep?”

“No. No one’s ever told me I do.” He reddened slightly, and Warren marked that as interesting. Interesting, and somehow appealing.

They lay in silence a while. Then Mannix said, “I’m hoping I wake up tomorrow in that nice little hollow I bedded down in last night. This will all just be one bad dream, and I’ll have forgotten it by breakfast. My horse will be there to carry me on to Red Rock, there won’t be any blizzards, and you’ll just be a story my kin tell each other, about how they’ll go headhunting some day for the glory of the South.”

“That’s a real nice dream,” Warren said. “White boys coming to headhunt me and all.” He laughed heartily, and Mannix frowned at that, like he was remembering just how many of those white boys Warren had buried.

That didn’t stop him from backing up to Warren in the center of the bed a minute later, though. And since it wasn’t technically flopping around, and since it wasn’t entirely unpleasant having something solid and familiar at his back, he let him stay there, and they passed the night that way, lying with their backs pressed up against each other, facing out into the dark.

\---

Morning came, and he opened his eyes to the funny little rectangular clock that read off the time in four digits side-by-side, not on a clock face. It didn’t even tick. He stared at it for too long, as if that strange little artifact of the world to come held all the horror of their present situation in its depths.

He felt Mannix shift beside him, and realized at some point in the night Mannix’d rolled over and wrapped himself around Warren. He also became aware that Mannix had a hard-on that was pressing into his back at this very moment. Well, if you couldn’t find the humor in a situation, you’d surely lose your mind. So he woke Chris Mannix up and laughed in his face, and that seemed to break some of the tension of the previous night, but not really as much as he’d hoped.

\---

The experience repeated the next day, as they kept searching the place. It seemed no matter where they looked, some violence had happened in this hotel, and something bore the memory of it. Sometimes it was only visions, like the dead family, but more often they were things—ghosts, he might as well say it. They learned soon enough that some places were safer than others. But none were really all that safe.  
  


\---

He found the scrapbook on the third day. He found it in the library. He’d been hoping the hotel had a library, and here it was. It was more of a walk-in closet, truth be told, but the walls were lined with books. Mostly, they were novels or travel books. He skipped past all those. What he was after was the history books, and found a collection on the bottom shelf. He read as much as he could handle, feeling strangely like he was skipping ahead in a story. It was pure irritation that the most popular topic in the piddling little history section was the Civil War, one thing he didn’t need to get caught up on. Writers seemed to lose interest in what came after for black folks, but even in the 1870s that much had been true. Still though, there was enough there that he could piece it together. The Erskine Mannixes of the world hadn’t gotten their South risen again from the ashes, but they’d gotten the run of the South as far as folks like Warren were concerned. A hundred years of more of the same shit. He wondered if he’d maybe take advantage of that gun, hit back at Erskine Mannix by shooting his son down. But shit, at the end of things, he was selfish. And he didn’t want to face this place alone.

He moved a stack of books, and under it was the scrapbook.

\---

He dropped the white scrapbook on the table in front of Mannix.

“What’s this?”

“History lesson.”

The pages crackled with yellowing newspaper clippings and old tintypes as Mannix opened it. The first page was the page with the picture of Minnie’s Haberdashery. A old tintype, cloudy at the corners with age. Mannix didn’t know Minnie’s Haberdashery from a hole in the ground, but he read the caption, then peered deeper at the picture. Saw the bodies lined up on the ground in front.

“What the hell happened here?”

“Murder at Minnie’s. Read the date they think it happened.”

“December fif—wasn’t that the day we were on our way there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was. Looks like old John Ruth was right about someone wanting to spring Daisy, much good it did him. Her gang killed everyone in the place, then laid in wait and killed him too. It was in all the papers.” He felt a cold, helpless rage crawling under his skin. Minnie and her people were murdered, and here he was sitting helpless to do anything about it, a hundred years removed.

“But what’s it doing in some hotel scrapbook?”

“Haven’t you guessed? The Overlook was built on top of Minnie’s. It’s the first episode in the Overlook's illustrious history.”

Mannix stared at the picture again, then looked up. “Who the fuck would put that in a scrapbook?”

He turned a page, to another article dated 1907. _The once-notorious site of one of the worst massacres in Wyoming is being turned to happier purposes. Noted for its scenic views, the spot will soon be the site of..._

It didn’t seem like a coincidence, them being scooped out of their time and dumped here the day of a mass murder. He thought of Minnie dead, pictured her with a bullet through her forehead, though truth be told he didn't know how she'd died, the papers didn't bother to say. Realized he was attributing some magic power there, like bullet holes had the power to rip through time as well as bodies.

"Well, I'll be damned. That was one hell of a bloodbath we missed," Mannix said. “You know who else died at Minnie’s? General Sandy Smithers.”

“That’s some silver lining,” he said. Mannix scowled at him, but in a kind of distracted way.

“So this place has always been bad. Right?”

That was the obvious conclusion. The trouble was, he couldn’t square what this place was now with what it’d been when Minnie was alive. The haberdashery hadn’t been like this. It had been nothing like this.

“I think we should try getting out of here,” he said.

Later that day they tried it, walking off into the snow, hoping to find a road that might be passable. They walked for a long time in the direction he remembered the road being, aware of nothing but the howl of the wind and Mannix’s footsteps behind him. He wasn’t surprised, exactly, when they found the Overlook in front of them, as if they’d been walking in a giant circle all along. “Looks like it don’t want us to go yet.”

“Well I don’t give a fuck what this place wants," Mannix said, face red and drawn up, looking more miserably cold than he’d looked when they’d picked him up in the stagecoach.

“No. But you’ll go along to survive until you find your time to make a move. That’s what you do when some asshole wants to keep you in place and you want to run.”

Mannix blinked at that, like he hadn’t ever thought of that.

“Like I said, I been through some shit. You keep your head and you bide your time until you get your chance. That's how you survive.”

\---

The next morning, Mannix went to down to tend to the boiler. He didn’t relish that either of them had been drafted into the role of winter caretaker, but keeping the place running seemed the thing to do since they didn’t know how long they’d have to be here.

Warren spent most of his time in the library, catching up on what he’d missed. He’d told Mannix a few things, like how the South never did rise again, that put him in a better mood and Mannix in a worse one, but for the most part, he kept what he read to himself, and he read to satisfy his own curiosity. Today, he was on his way to the library, when he cut through the kitchen to get there.

There were ghosts in the kitchen, more often than not, so he wasn’t surprised, exactly, to see someone in there. He was surprised when she turned and it was Minnie standing over a pot of stew, in one of her old gingham dresses. She was humming to herself.

“Well, hello, stranger. You been gone a long time.”

She turned, and he saw the blood staining her apron. It had dripped to the bottom of her apron, and was falling in a steady drip-drip on the floor.

“You ain’t Minnie.” He felt that crawling in his stomach again, and the helpless rage with it.

It smiled, pulled the corners of her lips up in a serene expression of acceptance.

“Well, I’m all that’s left of her, honey.” He knew that. Whatever was talking out of her was just wearing Minnie like a cheap suit.

“So who am I talking to?” he asked.

“That’s not really any of your business, Marquis.” She smiled again, but there was no warmth in the smile. “In due time, you’ll see my true face. I’m a lot older than Minnie. That’s why I like this body. Makes me feel young again.” And she winked at him coquettishly, an action that was so Minnie it twisted his heart a moment.

“Were you there. Even then? Under Minnie’s? I never felt you in all the time I was there.”

She smiled. “Oh, I was there. Just not as lively as I am now. The day she died is the day I woke up for real.”

So that explained it. He stepped a bit closer, made a show of looking wide-eyed and interested.

“Why are we here?”

She put her hands on her hips, shook her head. “You aren’t special, if that’s what you’re thinking, and I know you are, Marquis.”

“Just wondering, is all.”

She shook her. “The walls between time get mighty thin here, especially on… significant days. You’re not the first to slip through, and you won’t be the last.” He thought again of that image he’d had, of bullets ripping through Minnie and time both. “I didn’t see you coming, but it’s a good thing, you two coming along when you did. I thought I was in for a long winter all alone.”

Warren was silent. He’d stalked and killed a lot of white men, and if there was one thing he learned from all that, it was when to hold his tongue, and when it was better to let them carry on until they let slip with something useful. The thing was very far from human, but he still figured it for a white man in all the ways that really mattered.

“There was a winter caretaker to play with, but he wandered off into the snow three weeks ago. He couldn’t hold up. Not like you boys can.” She tilted her head at him. “You can’t kill me. That bothers you. You haven’t come up against something you can’t kill before.” She took a step towards him, that steady drip-drip of the blood stuttering for a moment in the rustle of her skirts. “I like that fighting spirit, Marquis. I think you have a lot of potential here. You could work for me."

“What if I said I was the self-employed type?”

“Oh, we know. But everyone works for me eventually.”

He acted fast, and largely on instinct. He saw the knife sitting on the cutting board, and thrust his hand at Minnie’s chest. He had expected it to be either solid or thin as air, but it wasn’t quite either. It was more like plunging his hand into sawdust and dead flies, horribly full of give. Dead things, and not all of them quiet. He pulled his hand away.

“That’s what I love about you. You think a knife and a gun will solve anything. That’s the kind of can-do spirit that tamed the West. Hell, you might be management material.”

He tried to calm the pounding in his heart, keep his head on straight. “It ain’t so tame where I come from. And I still work alone.” She was smiling merrily, like she--not she, it, dammit--was having a grand old time.

“Well if I can’t interest you, then what about your friend?”

“He works for me too,” he said shortly. He had meant to say that Mannix wasn’t his friend, but this what came out instead. It seemed as true as the other thing.

“You sure about that?”

Where was Mannix, anyway?

She started to laugh. “You better go find your friend.”

Her laughter followed him down the hall to the small, out of the way door to the boiler-room.

\---

  
He’d only been down to the basement once, and he’d developed an intense dislike of it. Down there that sense that the hotel was alive and hungry deepened, like without the layers of paint and wallpaper to offer some faint cover the rotten heart and stomach of the place pumped exposed. He’d given it a wide berth ever since.

He overheard voices, and drew up. Mannix was having his own chat with the hotel. He snuck a glance around the corner, got an eyeful of a severe old white man in Confederate grey. He spoke with a scratchy southern twang—thinned by age but alive with meanness.

“That kill-crazy sonofabitch’s sold you a bill of goods. We ain’t lying in wait to kill whoever walks in. I’m lying in wait to kill him, and surely he deserves it. We got a gun if you want it. Hell, you’ll probably need it. He’s a killer, and a tricky one.”

Mannix stared at him, eyes all cold and unreadable. “So that was your gun, that first night.”

“You going to make your father proud, son? I never knew Erskine Mannix, but if it was my son carrying on with an uppity nigger done up in an officer’s uniform, I’d have words with my son.”

Mannix swallowed, and drew a long breath. “The thought had occurred to me, sir. What my father would think.”

“There’s still time to do him proud.”

He felt some stupid faith in Chris Mannix that he didn’t even know he’d had dribble out of him. Still, he wasn’t going to stand in the shadows while they debated killing him. Warren stepped out of the shadows. “Old man, considering I’m the only one between the two of us that’s actually been on a battlefield, I think I outrank you. You ain’t Smithers. Not that I’d like you any better if you were.”

Mannix looked at him, and he expected him to look guilty, or surprised, or some damn thing. But instead he just looked at Warren and grinned, like he was pleased as pie to see him. For half a second he thought Mannix was on the verge of winking at him. He straightened up and looked at Smithers.

  
”You got one thing right about the major. The major is one hell of a killer. But see, that’s just what’s bothering me. The fact that the major is one of hell of a killer, yet you put that gun where either one of us could have gotten it.”

“It’s your own fault if you didn’t pick it up in time. If it were my boy—”

“If it were your boy nothing. You said you wanted to help me get him, but I think you don’t really give a damn which of us gets the other. The major’s right. You’re trying to set us off each other. Maybe you need us to kill each other cause you can’t do it you yourself.”

Warren shrugged at the thing. “We ain’t as easy marks as you figured, huh?”

“You’re a traitor to your cause, boy.” The thing’s face shifted, and it was now quite apparent that it wasn’t really Smithers at all. “And don’t think I don’t know why. I’ve seen the way you look at him. You’re like having that nigger tell you what to do. Gets you hard, don’t it? Nothing you’d like better than to be between his knees.”

That grin disappeared right off Mannix’s face.

“That’s a fucking lie,” he said. “That ain’t—that’s a fucking lie.”

“Oh, you are, boy. I’ve seen you. Think everyone in here has seen it. Haven’t you, major?”

Mannix looked frozen to the spot in sheer terror, and he flinched when Warren reached out to steer him away from the cellar.

“Come on, Chris,” he said, almost gently. “If you’re done in here, let’s go.” They walked up the stairs, leaving the thing that was not Smithers behind them.

  
Upstairs, in the light, Chris was running his hands through his hair. “General Sandy Smithers,” he said. “General Sandy Smithers thinks I’m….”

Don’t give yourself too much credit there. That wasn’t Smithers, just the hotel wearing him for a bit.”

Mannix stopped and stared at him. Took a step towards him, looked at him with one of those long looks he favored Warren with sometimes. Warren just held his gaze calmly, which seemed to make Mannix jumpier. He’d been amused by the idea of Mannix being that way, and specifically, that way for him, since he’d woken up with a hard-on against his back. Still, their tentative alliance had been fragile enough to shatter if he pushed the issue, and somehow, that had seemed like reason enough not to.

Now the issue lay on the floor between, and he was staring at Chris, wondering if the boy had a spine to do what he so obviously wanted to do. He licked his lips, and looked away, face burning again. “I’m not,” he said desperately. “You can’t think I am.” Then, like he was listening to his words, and didn’t like the jumpy, chickenshit picture they painted of him, he straightened up, and took a step towards him. “Or, shit, what if I am? What the fuck does it matter now?”

Warren laughed at him, and reached out for him.

“Fuck General Sandy Smithers,” he muttered, his hands traveling to Warren’s hips.

In the end, Mannix seemed to like touching him through his trousers just fine, his breath catching like this was the most dangerous thing he’d ever done. Maybe it was. Still, when the time came to do more, he seemed to need a fistfight to get himself over the shame of going down on his knees, or maybe it was just the sheer fucking pent-up tension of it all, all the fighting they hadn’t been able to do since arriving here, its own kind of blue balls for men like them. Whatever it was, Mannix almost smiled after Warren bloodied his nose a bit, and went down easy after that.

He seemed to like to get pushed and dragged once he was down on his knees too, ‘cause he went wherever Warren shoved him, his breath hard and loud in the empty lobby. Mannix’s hands on the fly of his pants were trippingly eager.

Then Mannix looked up at him with blood dripping out of his mouth and swallowed deep in the back of his throat, like he was looking for guidance. Warren took pity, and took Mannix by the thinning hair, set the pace for him. After a minute of that, Warren let his hand fall by his side, felt the throb in his jaw where Mannix had got in a glancing blow. Somehow having his whole face tingling from a blow made the feel of it all better, reminded him he was alive, and made that hot, willing mouth wrapped around his cock all the more satisfying.

He tasted blood in his mouth, though he couldn’t guess from where, and tongued the roof of his mouth, getting some satisfaction from knowing Mannix must be tasting similar, bloodied as his mouth was.

He watched Mannix palming himself through his trousers, and somehow that was what got him off in the end. Mannix kept on sucking his cock a long time after, even after he’d gotten himself off. Warren didn’t know if he stayed down there because he was ashamed, or stayed down there sucking on his softening prick cause he liked in his mouth. He decided it was both, mainly because that was the answer that best pleased him.

“And fuck this place,” Mannix said, coming up off him at last, like he was finishing a thought.

\---

After that, they fucked hard and often, and Warren found Mannix was amenable to just about everything he cared to do to him.

“Come on, hurry the fuck up,” Mannix whispered.

He’d stripped Mannix naked in the middle of that big empty lounge, got Mannix bent over one of the sofas. He was feeling particularly generous towards Mannix that night, so he’d gotten lard from the kitchen at dinner, got him loosened up really nice before he slipped inside.

“Christ, major,” Mannix said.

They fucked in front of those big two-story windows that turned into mirrors when the sun went down. If anyone was looking in from the outside, they must have been lit up like actors on a stage in all their debauchery, but Warren was pretty damn sure there was nothing out there in the dead snow watching them. Nothing watching them but what lived in the Overlook, and fuck, let it look.

“Giving this place quite a show, Chris,” he murmured in Chris’s ear.

Mannix shuddered a bit at that. “You know it.”

It knew. He could feel it watching, and it seemed to recoil when they fucked, like underneath all the blood and teeth it really was some fussy old hotel manager popping his monocle over two roughnecked bushwackers getting off on the good upholstery.

So it wasn’t any kind of surprise to him, exactly, when he heard the sound of voices approaching, and the sound of a band start up. One of the Overlook’s endless interchangeable soirees was drifting into being. They started up at night, for no purpose he could see than to keep them awake. A man’s voice over his shoulder say, “My god. Have you ever seen such a disgusting display?”

A group of men in tuxedos walked by—a few averting their eyes, but most staring openly.

“I didn’t realize they let niggers and nigger-lovers in here.”

Warren wasn't phased. Mannix getting shown off, and the hotel getting its balls in a twist were both perfectly happy outcomes as far as he was concerned. Still, Mannix tensed under him, and for a moment he was sure he was going to bolt like a skittish horse. Warren’s hands tightened on his hips, and he stroked his thumb along Mannix's hip bone.

He looked up. “Why, as a matter of fact, they're so desperate to have us they don't let us leave. We gotta get up to this just to pass the time.”

One of the men looked at Warren with cold menace. “Where I come from, we’d horsewhip men like you.”

A woman in a venetian mask smiled demurely. Her eyes flickered between them like a cat that’d caught a mouse. “We’d geld them and hang them, where I come from.”

Mannix ground out, “And where I come from, it’s rude to interrupt people in the middle of a goddamn fuck.”

Warren grinned down at his white boy, naked and sweaty, sprawled out across the sofa. Mannix was thrusting back, legs hooked around him. He did have some grit to him. Grit, and some special desperation to get Warren’s cock inside him, even under these circumstances, both of which Warren had to respect.

  
The man didn’t answer that, although there was a smile on the woman’s lips he didn’t exactly like. Rich white assholes, in one life and on into eternity. They didn’t disappear, just sauntered away, in the direction of the Gold Room. If Warren strained his ears, he thought he heard music, some tinny tune that sounded like nothing that existed when he was alive.

“I think maybe we’re off the party invite list now, major,” Mannix said tightly, and he wriggled up closer to him, trying to fuck himself on Warren’s cock.

“I ain’t so sure about that,” he muttered. It wasn’t, after all, like the Overlook had anyone else to play with. Mannix’s hands tangled in his shirt, pulling him down desperately. His breath was hitching with every thrust now, and they finished in a mad rush. Warren jerked him off this time, liking the feel of every ounce of need in that boy pressed up against his own hand.

When Warren collapsed on the sofa next to him, he felt winded. Mannix wrapped his arms around him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see folks bustling around in the periphery. An audience forming.

He felt a kind of chill travel down his spine. There was more activity here with each passing day. He felt a kind of certainty that the place, already awake, was getting restless.

\---

  
He woke up with Mannix wrapped around him, arm and leg slung over him, breath tickling the hairs at the back of Warren's neck. His left hand had snaked under Warren's shirt and was resting over his heart, like it was checking to make sure it was still beating.

Warren understood the impulse.

It was easy to feel most days like they were just another ghost haunting this place. He'd've suspected that's what they really were, except every morning and evening they still needed to eat and drink and every night they needed to sleep. And their hearts were still pumping blood through them. Bruises and cuts still rose up on their skin when they fought, and if they seemed to take curiously long to heal, well, time seemed to move slower here in lots of ways.

For men used to moving, used to hunting, used to killing, it was hell, watching the weeks, or maybe it was more, it was hard to tell, slip by. He hated the feeling of being caged more than anything else.

There wasn’t much else they could do, so they fucked. Beside that, they read and played cards and try to ignore the ghosts, brushing past them in hallways and lying dead in bathtubs and whispering in their ears all day and all night.

He memorized the books that told of all the Southern militias that would come, the spirital successors to Erskine Mannix that’d stalk black folks in the South for the next forty, fifty years, great and small. Who they were, and where they’d spring up. It was a foolish, half-baked sort of dream, his one gesture to the idea that he might ever get out of here and back to his own life. It wasn’t any kind of plan, since there were always plenty more where white men came from. But, hell. It’d satisfy him, and that was the guiding principle by which he’d lived his life so far. He wasn’t the type to sit on knowledge of white men needed killing and not use it. It was just a dream, though. One he wasn't ever going to get to put into any sort of practice.

“This place has put me off white assholes for good,” Mannix said to him one day, and Warren just about laughed his damn head off at that.

“What do you suppose your daddy would say to that?”

“My daddy wouldn’t be content with killing me, he knew a tenth of what I’d gotten up to with you. It’d be burning alive, slow-roasted on either side.”

He smiled, teeth shining in the dark. There was something a little haunting about the way his eyes glinted. Glimmering eyes and sharks teeth, always the last parts of him that he could see in the dark. “Major, if we make it back to our own time, I’d throw in with you going forward. For real.”

Warren watched him carefully. Boy looked serious. A bit crazy-eyed, at the moment, but deadly serious just the same.

He shrugged, tapped his pipe, then pushed Mannix away, because he didn’t like the way he was looking at him. “It’s a hypothetical question anyway.”

“You think we ain’t ever getting back.” They’d known it for some time, the way despair sneaks up on you. But neither of them had voiced it till now.

They’d tried to escape a few more times since the first, just for the hell of it, or maybe to see if the Overlook would let them die this time, but there was no getting away. Sour as it was towards them, it didn’t want to lose its toys. Besides, there was really no telling what they’d find beyond it, except a world that wasn’t their own. Maybe the Overlook was the last insane remnant of a dying civilization. Maybe all those books spoke of a world that wasn’t really there.

“No, I don’t.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one needs to make this suggestion, but can’t we just burn this place down?”

“No good. It’ll kill us, for starters. The blizzard ain’t let up once in weeks. For another, it won’t kill the thing that lives here.” The thing that wore Minnie and Smithers. The thing that thought he had management potential. “It was here before the Overlook, and it’ll still be here if we burn down the Overlook. I ain’t sacrificing myself just yet unless I’m taking that thing with me.”

  
\---

The lights and the heat went. Just like that, now you see anything, now you don’t. The dark and the cold shouldn’t have bothered them too much, but they’d let themselves get used to the electricity.

“You think this is the end?”

He didn’t answer that. Didn’t think he’d need to. It wanted them, and he felt certain now that it was getting ready to find a way to have them. Digging into itself and finding energy. One final push.

“I think it’s gearing up for the end.”

“What do we do?”

“We can still get ourselves together, and go and meet it.”

“You got a plan, major?”

“Not exactly, but maybe it’s time to try consider going out on our terms. We can at least burn its fucking hotel to the ground. You think you’re up for that, white boy?”

“You know I am,” he said, and he was pale, but he wasn’t cowed.

They fucked in their own bed that night, and for the first time in ages, they felt like they weren’t doing it with an audience. No one watching and disapproving. It was the first time he kissed Mannix, and he felt a little weird doing it, so he turned it into a bite that drew blood. The blood felt like the final proof that they were alive, and that seemed like something worth commemorating. They’d made it about as far as they could go.

\---

That night, the hotel abruptly came out of hibernation. Lights came back on. Music started up. Loud, discordant, like a hundred different bands playing a hundred different songs at once. The Overlook loved a good party, and right now, by the sound of it, it seemed to have all of the parties it had ever hosted going at once. Downstairs, the clock struck midnight.

So, fuck it. They weren’t going to get a proper night’s sleep after all. They dressed one last time together. They made it a group effort, Warren doing the buttons on Mannix’s shirt, and Mannix helping him with his coat. He guessed because they knew this was the end, and it seemed right to put their hands on each other one last time.

When they came downstairs, they saw the place flickering violently around them. People from different eras seemed to pass on top of each other, like painted sheets of glass laid on top of each other. It really was all the parties the Overlook had ever hosted, at once. He felt its power, its malice. Whatever it was, it was a truly deranged place, and he had the sense its hold on time was coming apart at the seams in its desire to get at them. The hotel itself was slipping through the thin places. A lot of them.

“What’s it doing?”

“My guess? It’s drawing on all its power.”

There are thin places here, he remembered the hotel telling him. Especially on significant days. Well, today was a ticker tape day, then: the holes in the walls separating times were becoming less swiss cheese and more like a spider web. The holes were the hotel now.

  
“We keep to the plan,” he said, and they moved towards the cellar.

The building itself seemed to be warping around them. He felt, with a terrible certainty, that the walls could close on them at any moment. For a while, he couldn’t find the cellar—things were shifting around, all over the place, or rather, all through time. He saw flashes and flickers of things—men in their 1907 work-clothes, setting dynamite, back when this place was first being built. The boiler, pushing itself to overheating. Someone yelling, “It’ll blow sky high if you push it too far.” Mostly though, he saw the place with its skin coming off, the husks and bones underneath.

Death and destruction, down through the ages, nothing but a towering monument to all the death and cruelty people could do and then hide under the floorboards. He felt like he could smell it, the layers of blood and bleach, laid upon each other, not dissolving each other but working together, the rotten truth and the civilized lie, to make a home.

_And you fit in so well. You’d be management material._

The thought came to him like a voice in his ear. Shit, when looked at that way, he did fit in here. But fuck it. He wanted out.

At last, they were down in the cellar, with no real memory of how they’d got there. Over in one corner was a shape, which maybe was man-shaped, or at least had been, once. It was wearing a Confederate general’s coat. The shape spoke and it was an older man’s voice, soft and commanding, scratchy like backwoods branches.

“You know what that man is doing,” Smithers said, “You know what he’s got planned?”

“Same as me. He’s planning to blow you sky high.”

“He ain’t told you yet? Jesus, you’re a sad sight, get led around by the balls. If you were my boy, I’d keel over and die of shame.”

“You already are dead, General,” Mannix said flatly.

“You know what he’s got planned if he ever gets back to you own time?” the thing repeated. “He’s planning to take what he’s learned about the men who carry on the spirit of the cause, and he’s planning to go back and kill them. He’s planning to destroy everything we worked for, all the men who’ve followed in your daddy’s footsteps. Is that what you want, Chris?”

Mannix shrugged. “That sure does sound like him,” he said. “Fuck. Let him. I’m a bit sour on the Cause these days.”

The general’s form began to flicker, not like it was dissolving, but like it had been holding itself back, wearing a mask of normalcy that it was happy to drop. Standing near it, Warren was aware that the was near a thing of immense power. The flickering sped up, and the thing that lived in the Overlook began showing all its past selves at once, all the tired skins it’d worn. No, not just wearing faces from the past, it was straddling all these times at once. That was the benefit of the thin places, for the thing. It could drawn on itself in all its times, and it had the power to draw in what it wanted and needed. And he supposed the two of them were what it wanted and needed, at the moment. He could briefly make out faces rushing past—skins it had worn, and the stuff underneath. Sometimes he could see the skin stripped away, and he saw a shape made out of sawdust and wasps nests, the dead flies he had felt with Minnie. He felt certain that if those things touched him, they would have him, and they would not let go.

Mannix had scrambled to the boiler, and stood ready to throw the switch into high. They’d worked it out, and it seemed the best way to burn the Overlook down—overheat the boiler, blow them all to kingdom come. He was standing there, lit up with flames, ready to do it. Ready to throw himself on the fire. No more hotel, and no more them. But something was nagging at Warren. Something he suspected even the Overlook had overlooked.

He thought of the first time he’d made physical contact with the thing that lived in the Overlook, the sickening sensation of dead skin and wasp’s nests, as close to a true physical form under all the others as he’d ever felt.

“Hold up there, Chris.”

Thought of the sawdust and dead flies he’d felt, when he’d stuck his hand through Minnie. That shade hadn’t been substantial enough to hurt. But this thing before them, with all its past selves stacked up together? Sure, it added up to immense power, and, he was certain, a thing of substance, powerful enough to kill them.

But maybe, just maybe, it added up to a hell of a piece of kindling.

It came for him, and it had him in radius. He felt himself split apart.

In all times simultaneously, he struck a match, in all times simultaneously he thrust his whole hand into the chest of the thing that lived in the Overlook. It caught, and it caught bad. His hand was inside it and for a moment he was sure he was going to burn, be annihiliated down to his past. But the match had caught, and the thing that lived in the Overlook was on fire, in all possible times, including in the deep down bedrock far beneath Minnie’s cellar, when it first stirred. It all lit up.

The thing screamed at him, and he thought, _this is what you get for trusting me with matches_ , even as his hand throbbed in more pain than he’d ever known, even as he expected that to be the end of him.

But it wasn’t the end of him, because Mannix had a hold of his arm and was dragging him away from the thing, and for a minute he was afraid it was too much, his burnt hand would stay with it, that he’d feel the sickening sensation of it breaking away in the thing’s insides, but before he could yell at Mannix to stop his hand was free and throbbing in the cellar air.

“Come the fuck on!” Mannix yelled, dragged him up the stairs.

He didn’t need to be told to run by Chris Mannix, of all people. He ran. As the thing that lived in the Overlook was burning in all times simultaneously, the Overlook, the hotel that owed its existence to its influence, was being unmade around them. He would have thought that’d be instantaneous, but the past unmaking itself seemed to mirror the slow, hard death of the thing in the cellar. The place instead seemed to thrash and unravel, space warping around them, and they stumbled on the stairs as the boards underneath them twisted and nails popped.

With a desperate burst of energy, they made it to the lobby, where the ghosts were flickering out of view, though the floor was still littered with trash and confetti and Mannix nearly went down slipping on it. The flickering in their vision intensified. They were running through times, and it occurred to him that if they survived and made it out the door, he had no idea where they would find themselves.

The last thing he felt before they stepped out into the snow was the thing’s pain, now palpable. It throbbed through the air and in his burnt hand, and he saw clearly that, it—they—were being dragged back to the place it dreaded, the darkness, that moment in time just before it first stirred and drew breath and smelled blood coming on the wind.

He landed hard on the snow. He buried his burnt hand in the snow, which was some relief. Mannix lay beside him, dazed. He flipped himself up and stared across the snowy plain. The Overlook was gone. Like it never was.

Mannix let out a whoop and clapped him on the shoulder. “You are one brilliant motherfucker.”

He hollered again, but Warren couldn’t muster anything but a wave of his hand, and a few ragged coughs. He laid back in the snow. For the first time since before they’d come to the Overlook, it wasn’t snowing, and you could see the damn stars.

“How’s your hand?”

He looked at it, and Warren saw that the burn was fading away, like it was be unmade. “I’ll live.”

“Where do you suppose we are?”

“I don’t really give a fuck, as long as we ain’t there.”

“Yeah,” Mannix said tiredly, then slumped up against him.

Warren replayed the final frenzied thoughts from the Overlook in his head. _The moment in time just before it first stirred and drew breath and smelled blood coming on the wind._ The thing had awoken with the massacre at Minnie’s. Was that when they were? Just before that? Like the night before?

Next to him, Chris said, “Is that a light?”

And shit. It was. Compared to the unflickering glow of electric lighting, it was easy to miss, but as their eyes adjusted, they could see it was a single lonesome lantern swinging in the dark.

Low, rough-hewn cabin, nestled in the valley, between stable and outhouse. Undisturbed. It was Minnie’s.

He felt a hope kindle in his chest. They got themselves up for one last push, and they walked towards the swinging lantern.


End file.
